Rating(s) of the fic you want: PG-13 or R
Things you want your gift to include:
a. witty!Draco
b. Hogsmeade
c. Halloween
d. canon!Hermione
e. a late romantic evening with a fire (in a
fireplace) and some form of alcohol
What you don't want your gift to include: song lyrics,
makeover!Hermione, character deaths, clueless!Harry,
HG/HB
Not quite sure that this should be PG-13, however, I think all the alcohol and stuff might just warrant it.
Enjoy!
Stories to Tell the Children
"I can't believe my only child is marrying a Potter," Draco said for the tenth time that day.
"Yes dear," said Hermione, not taking her eyes off the book she was reading.
"Not only that, she's marrying the son of a Weasley! She'll be Cosette Weasley-Potter!" Draco sighed and stared into the fire. "It's like all my worst nightmares are coming true."
"And I daresay your father said the same thing when you married me, dear." Hermione rearranged her position on the sofa so that she was leaning against him.
"Well, yes..." Draco draped an arm around her shoulders and took a sip from the wineglass he held in his hand. "He also said that I was a disgrace to the family name and threatened to kill us both."
"I hope you're not going to do anything quite that drastic."
"Only if he hurts her. Otherwise I suppose I'm just going to have to grin and bear it." He brooded in silence for a second before his eyes suddenly widened. "Oh Merlin, our grandchildren are going to have red hair!"
Hermione put down her book and looked at him. "That's extremely unlikely. The gene for red hair is recessive, so one of us would have to have given it to Cosette in order for her to have red-haired children. I presume you don't have any redheaded relatives I don't know about?"
"Of course not! They're all dashing blonds... like me." Draco grinned. "What about you?"
"Well..." She averted her eyes. "Apparently my grandmother's hair used to be a sort of... reddish colour."
Draco stared at her. "That's it, then. We're doomed."
Hermione smiled. "Doomed to a life of redheaded grandchildren. I can think of worse fates."
"Such as?"
"Cosette could hate you forever for not letting her marry the man of her dreams."
"Fine. Point taken." He looked down at her grinning face. "There's no need to look so smug about it."
"Sorry," Hermione said, her expression not changing.
"Why you little..."
Draco was just about to pounce on his wife and tickle her senseless when there was a knock at the door.
"Come in," Hermione said, struggling to sit up straight.
Their daughter poked her head around the door. "Are you still awake? Can I come in?"
"Of course you can. Is everything all right?" Hermione made room for her on the sofa.
"Yes, everything's fine..." Cosette entered the room to reveal that she was wearing her dressing gown, and her blonde curls were tied in a loose ponytail. "I just couldn't sleep," she said, gently closing the door. "So I thought--" She looked around the room. "How come your room is so much bigger than mine?!"
Hermione raised her eyebrows and looked at Draco questioningly.
"What?" Draco asked innocently. "There's one of you and two of us. The Hog's Head is an inn, you know, not a five-star hotel. If you wanted a five-star hotel you shouldn't have decided to get married in Hogsmeade, of all places..."
"Dad, I've told you, Hogsmeade is special to us." Cosette smiled good-naturedly and went to sit in the armchair next to the sofa her parents were occupying.
"Ignore him, Cosette. He's just in a bad mood because your wedding is making him feel old."
"It is not. I'm in a bad mood because you're marrying the son of my arch-nemesis."
Cosette sighed. "Dad, we've been through this..."
"I was just reminding him of how his father reacted when the two of us got married." Hermione said.
"How was that?" Cosette asked, intrigued.
"With death threats, apparently."
"You see, Cosette, Harry Potter was also one of my father's nemeses, and since your mother was and is still, sadly, one of his best friends, not to mention the fact that she's not a pureblooded witch, he had certain... reservations in regards to our relationship."
Cosette shook her head. "So how did the two of you even get together in the first place?"
"Well," said Draco, "We were both very, very drunk."
"Draco!" Hermione hit him playfully. "We weren't drunk. We were... slightly tipsy."
"Your mother was talking to a pumpkin."
"I was not! ...Was I?"
"I think you thought it was a house elf."
"Anyway," said Hermione, "We were at a party, celebrating the defeat of Lord Voldemort. Rather reluctantly, in your father's case."
"Why reluctantly?" Cosette asked, confused.
"My father had some rather strong ties to Voldemort; ties I had hoped to reap the benefits of when Dumbledore and Harry Potter were defeated once and for all. But alas, it was not to be..."
"Oh, poor Draco... You wouldn't have liked it, anyway. They would have worked you far too hard."
"Not half as hard as you work me, I would wager..."
"Hang on," Cosette said to her increasingly more distracted parents, "Dad was a Death Eater?"
"No, of course not. Not really."
"I would have been, though!"
"No, you wouldn't. You would have come to your senses."
"Maybe."
"So..." Cosette said, seeing that she needed to get the conversation back on track. "You were at a party and you were very drunk. Then what?"
"Well," said Hermione, "Somehow we ended up outside, an--"
"Your mother went out to be sick, and I followed to make fun of her," Draco interrupted.
"We ended up outside, and the next thing we knew we were kissing."
"After she was sick, and had washed out her mouth with water from the fountain."
"Draco, would you stop being so..."
"So accurate?"
"You are making it all sound rather unromantic, Dad."
"There was romance, just not on that particular night."
"Why don't you tell her about that, then," said Hermione, who was becoming a little exasperated.
"Very well." Draco nodded smugly.
Hermione reached for her glass of wine and smiled, while Cosette looked from one to the other attentively.
"It was a dark and stormy night..." Draco began dramatically.
"Draco!" Hermione exclaimed. "You can't start there! Not in front of our daughter."
"I can and I will," said Draco. "It's integral to the plot."
Hermione leant back and narrowed her eyes. "I hope you know what you're doing."
"I always know what I'm doing, dear, you know that. Now, Cosette, as
I was saying..."
It was a dark and stormy night. The wind howled through the trees on the mountainside, and rain fell from the sky as if some omnipotent being had decided that the whole population of the British Isles desperately needed a cold shower.
Now, I can't speak for anyone else, but in our case... this omnipotent being would have been right.
"Oh, Draco!" cried Hermio--
"Draco! This is not integral to the plot."
"Fine, we'll skip the sex. As usual."
"Draco, I am warning you..."
"It was a dark and stormy night!" Draco began again.
We were lying in bed, watching the torrents of rain splashing at the windows slowly ebb, and dreading what was to come.
The Halloween office party.
It promised to be terribly, terribly dull, as it always was. Well, apart from that time when someone spiked all the drinks with a love potion and Zacharias Smith spent half an hour trying to convince Millicent Bulstrode that the two of them were soul mates... but one couldn't do such things too often without arousing suspicion.
Hermione and I argued over which dress she should wear, I couldn't find my best dress robes and had to settle for the less expensive ones, and we left.
The late evening sun was just visible through the parting clouds as we began to walk down the road, but by the time we arrived the stars were out. It was still too cold despite the fact that the storm had passed, so we hurried inside.
When we exited the cloakroom Pansy Parkinson intercepted me and talked at me for several minutes. When there was finally a suitable gap in this rather one-sided conversation I turned to Hermione to tell her to feel free to go and mingle... but she wasn't there.
I thought nothing of it and continued talking to Pansy, but when I eventually went to find Hermione... I couldn't.
She wasn't anywhere in the main party room, nor in the cloakroom. Millicent told me that she wasn't in the ladies' room.
I went outside. Perhaps she had just gone out for a breath of fresh air... but no, she wasn't there either. I was getting rather worried and decided to ask for help in finding her.
I was moving back towards the door when I felt something crack beneath my foot. I lifted it and looked down.
There, lying on the ground in two pieces, was Hermione's wand.
I picked it up and ran back inside to get help, only to find that everyone was already too drunk to be of any use.
I cursed loudly, which earned me a few confused looks, and decided to go home and find a map so that I could do a Locator Charm.
This plan went fairly without incident, so sadly I can't tell you about the Heroic Search For The Map.
I can, however, tell you about the Heroic Rescue Of Hermione From Kidnappers.
I determined Hermione's location to be somewhere in the nearby mountain forest and immediately made my way there on my broomstick. I touched down in a small clearing, and it didn't take me long to find Hermione, who was being tied to a tree nearby. Not without protest, I hasten to add; one of her assailants, an old school friend of mine called Gregory Goyle, was curled up in pain on the ground because Hermione had kneed him in the groin, and the other, Vincent Crabbe, had tied her bonds rather sloppily in his haste to get away from her.
I knocked Crabbe out with a simple spell, left Goyle writhing in the fallen leaves and was about to untie Hermione when we heard a loud crack and Pansy Parkinson was standing in front of us.
"Draco," she said, sounding rather surprised. "What are you doing here?"
"I think the more pertinent question," I told her coolly, "Is 'What is Hermione doing here?' Why have you abducted my girlfriend, Pansy?"
Pansy broke into tears and went into a rather long and tiresome rant about how Hermione was all wrong for me and it was supposed to be her, Pansy, on my arm and by my side, not Harry Potter's Mudblood friend.
Finally I became impatient. "That's enough, Pansy," I said, proceeding to finally untie Hermione. "You may be everything my father wants me to have, but the fact is that I love Hermione more than you could ever comprehend. So just grow up and leave us alone, or I shall hunt you down and exact painful revenge on you."
With that, I turned to Hermione and we walked away, hand in hand.
After a while I asked if she wanted to get on the broomstick, but she said that she would prefer to walk for a little longer.
We walked in silence for several minutes, enjoying the sound of fallen leaves swishing beneath our feet and of owls hooting in the moonlight. Eventually we reached a small stream. We were watching the silver water flow past our feet when Hermione turned to me.
"Draco, did you really mean what you said back there? About how much you loved me?"
"Of course I did," I replied.
"You're sure you wouldn't be better off with someone like Pansy? I mean, I'm not really--"
I cut her off with a long, tender kiss. I could feel her sinking into my arms with relief.
"Hermione..." I said, pulling away ever so slightly. "Marry me?"
She stared at me and let out a small gasp. I could see her breath hanging in the air as she opened and closed her mouth. After a moment she gave up trying to talk and just kissed me again.
Obviously this meant "yes", because just over a year later we were happy newlyweds with a baby on the way....
"...A baby who then grew up to marry the son of her father's arch-nemesis, one Harry Potter. The end," said Draco smugly. "There," he said, turning to Cosette, "Was that romantic enough for you?"
Cosette laughed. "Not bad. Not bad at all."
Hermione smiled at Draco and kissed him lightly on the lips. Cosette took this as her cue to leave.
"Well, I'd better try to get some sleep," she told her parents, standing up. "Big day tomorrow, you know."
They exchanged goodnights and Cosette left, leaving Draco and Hermione to silently gaze at each other for a rather long period of time.
"You didn't tell her what happened afterwards," Hermione said, tracing his jawline with her finger.
"How we went home and made love by the fire? That's because I was planning a re-enactment of that particular part. I didn't really think she should be present for that."
Hermione laughed and surrendered herself to the feeling of her husband's
lips on her neck.
The End
Author's Note: To Taintless: See, I can write fluff! Nobody died, again! I only usually write depresing stuff... Seriously, thanks for always leaving me such great reveiws, it always makes my day :)